March 16, 2018 On Art The Original Little Mermaid By Amber Sparks On Kay Nielsen, Disney, and the sanitization of the modern fairy tale. A concept drawing by Kay Nielsen for The Little Mermaid. The mermaid in the illustration was lithe, mysterious, sylphlike. She perched on a rock, inscrutable. For years, I’d been bombarded with the images, books, merchandise, and endless one-offs of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Disney’s Ariel was redheaded, cheerful, an open book—voluptuous in that squeaky-clean cartoon way. She was certainly not the mermaid Hans Christian Andersen envisioned when he wrote his tragic tale. But here was a sad water sprite who was the perfect embodiment of the ambiguous virtues of folklore. I’d stumbled across her online, in a series of concept drawings for Disney’s The Little Mermaid. They had been drawn in the fifties and shelved for thirty years. Read More
March 16, 2018 Eat Your Words Cooking with Alexandre Dumas By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. If the lavish feasts and epic drinking sessions of The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), are any indication, seventeenth-century France was the era of the gourmand. The musketeers—Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—and their young friend d’Artagnan, the Gascon nobleman who is the book’s hero, are frat boys of a different era, men for whom an ordinary evening at home is thus: Porthos was in bed, and was playing a game of lansquenet with Mousqueton [his servant], to keep his hand in; while a spit loaded with partridges was turning before the fire, and on each side of a large chimney-piece, over two chafing dishes, were boiling two stew-pans, from which exhaled a double odour of rabbit and fish stews, rejoicing to the smell. In addition to this … the top of a wardrobe and the marble of a commode were covered with empty bottles. The musketeers know no moderation. They order multiple bottles of wine for a quick drink, and at one point, one of them consumes an entire wine cellar. When Aramis plans to eat an omelet with a side of spinach, his friends ultimately convince him to say to the waiter, “Return from whence you came; take back these horrible vegetables … Order a larded hare, a fat capon, mutton leg dressed with garlic, and four bottles of old Burgundy.” Read More
March 15, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Queer Addiction and “America First” Jingoism By Kaveh Akbar In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Kaveh Akbar is on the line. Dear Poets, I am currently experiencing a strange period. My husband passed away last year, on the day before Thanksgiving. We held a small family memorial in November, a public memorial in February, and will inter his ashes at a small ceremony in April. I am dreading the end of these memorials because I have read that after the final ceremony, usually the burial, the spirit of the recently departed will know that all is well and they will leave to allow the family to move on. We have received many signs that he is here with us, and I don’t want that to end. I dread it so much. Is there a poem for me? Thank you, Don’t Let Him Leave Read More
March 15, 2018 At Work I’m the Marmalade: An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum By Ben Shields In the fall of last year, I found myself in Tenth Avenue’s 192 Books, chatting with a stranger. The man (whose enviable green coat had temporarily distracted me from his visage) was thumbing through a copy of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation. This volume was, we quickly learned, a shared obsession. I was about to ask the man’s name when I suddenly realized there was no need: it was the critic, poet, novelist, performer, and academic Wayne Koestenbaum. A few weeks later, I traveled to Koestenbaum’s nearby apartment to sort through manuscripts, long-forgotten first drafts, personal notebooks, and correspondence as far back as his undergraduate years at Harvard. I had begun cataloguing a daunting portion of his collected works—from academic journal articles to Vogue magazine columns—into a comprehensive bibliography. (The bibliography was the distillation of Koestenbaum’s literary archive, purchased last year by Yale University.) To handle a writer’s work in this way puts one in the privileged position of speaking with the writer about it. The release of Koestenbaum’s new poetry collection, Camp Marmalade, which was published last week, provided another occasion for us to talk of his work. This excellent book is the second volume in a trilogy of what the author calls “trance writing”; the first is The Pink Trance Notebooks. Put simply, the approach allows language to move freely through Koestenbaum as he improvisationally explores subjects dear to his heart and intellect, including stars, sex, and Susan Sontag. The language that appears does not often adhere to expected thematic, syntactic, or logical patterns. Throughout our conversation, we discussed the book’s eccentric aesthetic, as well as subjects ranging from Agnes Moorehead to the theories of Donald Winnicott. Though the interview took place virtually (Koestenbaum in New York, me in Tel Aviv), our sensibilities jibed the same as ever. Read More
March 14, 2018 Comics Phoning Home By Barry Blitt © Barry Blitt Barry Blitt is a cartoonist and illustrator. He is the creator of hundreds of New Yorker covers and is a regular contributor to the New York Times and Vanity Fair.